Offer of payment led to foreclosure

By Josh Funk THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Tuesday

Jan 30, 2007 at 12:38 AM

After Ivan Eicher lost his job, he and his wife, Delores, fell several months behind on their house payments. Facing foreclosure, they accepted an offer from a company that promised to help them keep the home where they’d lived for more than 20 years.

Without realizing what they were doing, the couple ended up surrendering ownership of their home.

“It was just a really nice song and dance,” Delores Eicher said.

The Eichers are among the thousands of people who fall each year for offers that promise to help them avoid foreclosure but that leave them with none of the equity they had built up in their property. Their situation matches one of the three common models of foreclosure fraud the National Consumer Law Center has described in a report on the growing problem.

Foreclosures nationwide soared 42 percent in 2006, to 1.26 million, according to RealtyTrac, an Irvine, Calif.-based company that tracks foreclosures. That creates opportunities for fraud, although the number of cases is difficult to determine because they are generally lumped in with other kinds of fraud in crime reports.

The Eichers thought they were taking out a $1,700 loan to help them pay their roughly $4,700 in back mortgage payments. They learned too late they had signed their house over to Mid-America Financial Investment Corp. and agreed to lease their home from Mid-America when they accepted that loan.

Although the couple no longer owned their home, the mortgage remained in their names, so they made their $554 payments on the loan through Mid-America, along with monthly fees of at least $100.

Elizabeth Renuart, a staff lawyer at the National Consumer Law Center who co-authored the report on foreclosure fraud, said such schemes are popular in areas of the country where home values have soared, but any homeowner who has been paying down a mortgage for many years will have significant equity and can become a target.

A second scheme described in the report involves consultants charging high fees to help homeowners out of trouble but never delivering the promised services. A third involves an agreement where a homeowner knowingly signs over their home and agrees to buy it back over time, but the terms of the agreement make it nearly impossible for the homeowner to succeed.

The Eichers became part of a lawsuit against Mid-America in 2001. They eventually won the title to their home back after the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled in 2005 Mid-America had defrauded them and 12 other homeowners in the Omaha area.

Scott Bloemer and Elaina Hollingshead, who run Mid-America, did not respond to The Associated Press’ requests for comment. Bloemer and Hollingshead defended their business practices in court and argued the paperwork the Eichers and others signed spelled out what was involved in the deals. But the courts ruled Bloemer’s and Hollingshead’s testimony wasn’t credible.

Renuart said foreclosure rescue agreements can be difficult to decipher — even for a lawyer.

“It’s hard to make heads or tails of these agreements,” she said.

That’s one reason why at least eight states have adopted laws designed to help protect consumers from the questionable practices of some foreclosure consultants. The Nebraska Legislature is considering such legislation this year, based on a law Colorado passed last year.

Most such laws require the agreements to be spelled out in writing, and offer homeowners a chance to cancel the agreements within a few days of signing them.

For most of 2006, Colorado was the state with the highest residential foreclosure rate in the nation, according to RealtyTrac. Colorado had one new foreclosure filing for every 376 households in December.

The Eichers and a dozen other homeowners who sued said they never had a chance to read the Mid-America loan documents before signing them, because Bloemer and Hollingshead rushed them through the process.

One of the other people who successfully sued Mid-America, Steven Starman, said he realizes now he should have read the documents carefully instead of relying on oral explanations.

“I made decisions based on what I was told,” Starman said. “They tell you what you want to hear.”

Renuart and groups that track foreclosures worry many more Americans could fall victim to fraud because the adjustable-rate and interest-only mortgages taken out in recent years will likely contribute to a jump in foreclosures when loan payments increase.

RealtyTrac said 109,652 homes across the nation entered some stage of foreclosure in December, a nearly 9 percent drop from the previous month, but an increase of 35 percent from December 2005. The company reported a national foreclosure rate of one new foreclosure filing for every 1,055 U.S. households.

And the Center for Responsible Lending issued a report in December predicting 2.2 million foreclosures in the coming years among homeowners with so-called sub-prime loans, which are loans offered at rates higher than the prime rate and that are aimed at people with poor credit ratings.

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